When children receive their second measles-mumps-rubella vaccine, around the time they start kindergarten, they gain protection against all three viruses for all or most of their lives. Yet the effectiveness of an influenza vaccine given in October starts to wane by the following spring.
Scientists have long been stymied by why some vaccines can coax the body to produce antibodies for decades, while others last mere months. Now, a study led by researchers at Stanford Medicine has shown that variation in vaccine durability can, in part, be pinned on a surprising type of blood cell called megakaryocytes, typically implicated in blood clotting.
The question of why some vaccines induce durable immunity while others do not has been one of the great mysteries in vaccine science. Our study defines a molecular signature in the blood, induced within a few days of vaccination, that predicts the durability of vaccine responses and provides insights into the fundamental mechanisms underlying vaccine durability.”
Bali Pulendran, PhD, professor of microbiology and immunology, Stanford Medicine
In a 2022 study, Pulendran and colleagues defined a “universal signature” that could predict an early antibody response to many vaccines. However, this and other studies did not define a signature that could predict how long antibody responses would last.
The new paper will be published Jan. 2, 2025, in Nature Immunology. Pulendran is the senior author, and formal postdoctoral scholars Mario Cortese, PhD, now at Gilead Sciences, and Thomas Hagan, PhD, now an assistant professor at the University